The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo Sound. This area gets almost no snowfall, and except for a few steep rocks this is the only continental part of Antarctica devoid of ice. The sculpted and shadowy terrain looks like something not of this Earth; some valleys' floors occasionally contain perennially frozen lakes with ice several meters thick. And under the ice, in the dark and extremely salty water live mysterious simple organisms, a subject of on-going research.

Lake Vanda in Wright Valley features extremely salty water underneath thick layer of incredibly clear ice. The patterns of clear ice are uniformly fascinating throughout the Dry Valleys, for example around the edge of Lake Hoare:

Mount Erebus (3,794 meters), Ross Island, is the most active volcano in Antarctica, which also contains "persistent" lava lake, one of a very few long-lived lava lakes in the world - clearly visible from space:

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8 Comments:

Beautiful pictures. Although I believe that if that third picture down had been sent from one of the martian rovers, it would have been cited as evidence of extra-terrestrial life, does look like a face in profile, or is it just me ?

If there is frozen water in Antartica then doesn't that mean that the contenient used to not be covered in ice. This means that "global warming" could be a natural thing but just being onset sooner due to human intervention?

The existence of frozen water would also occur if the contenient used to be covered in ice - that is what ice is.

Even if Antarctica was once iceless (indeed this was almost certainly the case in Pangea and Gondwana Land) that says nothing of what would happen to our modern costal cities if this were to happen again. The same applies to animals now (but not formerly) trapped on islands or low-lying land, unique speciation events in costal forrests, world heritage coastal sites, etc.

Nor does this prove, or even suggest, that humankind is not causing these changes this time around, as many would argue this SUDDEN rate of change (rather than the possible millenia in previous ages) suggests.

The underwater lakes are a natural phenomenon. Most are buried under 2 miles of ice and are suspected to have microbial life forms that have been isolated from the rest of the planet for a very long time. Also NASA does test different designs down there. When I was there they asked if we could hop on a snow machine and ride 70 miles in the middle of winter to collect a big rolling ball that had hung up on the ice somewhere. We politely declined.